The final months…

As Kurt Vonnegut would say, ‘and so it goes’. Andor comes to an end, not with an ending but with the throughline that life continues, that the fight to be who we are, continues no matter whether we’re being observed or not.

Luthen’s commitment to the cause is filled out and we, finally, learn something about him, about who he was before all this resistance. We learn the solid truth that resistance is always at the same risk as fascism – of eating itself before it can establish itself.

We learn that resistance can become an industry, so focused on resisting that it forgets its entire purpose – which is to fight for something, not to fight against something. In so doing that industry kills those who dissent as quickly as any other kind of oppressor because the narrative becomes the playthings of those who hold power.

If resistances start with small acts of defiance arising spontaneously then they grow and ossify into communities whose leaders are precious about the power they accumulate. Even Mon Mothma is guilty of recasting those who came before her as problematic, all the better to erase their contribution and solidify her own place at the top of this new tree.

We tend to forget that those who come to resist are often those who had power under the old regime and find themselves disenfranchised now. This too frequently means they are just looking for a new home in which to carry on as they’ve always done.

Resistance breeds disparate bedfellows.

And yet.

Andor reminds us too that this is inevitable and natural and just part of what we have to wrestle with if we’re to succeed in resisting those who brought us together in the first place.

It’s not ever really about the lesser of two evils. That’s to mistake reality as falling short of being able to achieve a pure good. It can’t. Andor pushes back against the idea of there being only evil choices. It is fixed on the idea that life is a balance of imperfections and that it’s about choosing the greatest good knowing that good is a thread woven through with human foibles and flaws.

We shouldn’t ever cede ground to the idea of lesser evils, only of lesser and greater goods. It’s a tougher emotional stance to hold onto but it is more powerful. Imagine choosing who to vote for based on the greatest good they will deliver. It doesn’t excuse or erase the things we don’t like or disagree with, but it allows us to get some perspective about what is right, about the gap between those who are least good and those who are most.

If we see the choices ahead, the dangers now in how Cassian ends up being restricted by the very people who should be supporting him we also see how an incipient movement becomes something mainstream.

Gilroy finishes by reminding us that someone like Cassian Andor and especially someone like Luthen Bael are people of a moment, their power codified in some opportunity, some fulcrum upon which they stand that allows them to make a difference.

It’s not the Big Man theory of history, more that individuals can act and have outsize influence on the world. Luthen ends being despised by the people he made space for. Without him none of them prosper but they cannot bear to accept his methods or recognise his sacrifices because they represent something different. A case of the children rejecting the parents who made them possible.

If there’s hope at the end of Andor season 2 it’s not provided by the show but by the knowledge we as viewers bring knowing the outcome. I think that is important because that sense of an ending is entirely inferred from what we already know.

In real life we would be where Cassian is at the end of Andor – not knowing what comes next except the enemy has all the power, but that we will fight because it means something to us – to fight for a world we want to see even if we have no hope of ever seeing it.

That’s all we can do in the end – fight for something, try to build something – because if we are defined only as fighting against then we will disappear as surely as our enemy. Rebellions might be built on hope but they have to have more to them than that because when hope is gone, what is left?

10 agents out of 10

Stewart Hotston